“It’s not an evolution of Infinity Blade; it’s not the next iteration of Infinity Blade. It’s a completely different game,” Fergusson told GameInformer.

Instead, the game came about as a “passion project”.

“What we did after we shipped Gears [of War] 3 is we did a game jam in the studio where we let a bunch of people self-organise into teams and come up with a week of just working in the engine, seeing what kind of fun things they could make,” the development director said.

“I think it was a group of about seven guys came up with this idea of ‘let’s do a dungeon crawler’; they started building that up and after the week we kind of reviewed all the different prospects and it sort of resonated within the company.”

Fergusson said he thought it would be “really interesting” for the core Epic team – as opposed to Infinity Blade developer Chair – to have its own mobile game as a “palette cleanser” between Gears of War titles, and the idea proved popular because the team really loves “high fantasy stuff”.

“But as they continued developing it was sort of like, well, why do we need two fantasy IPs? it makes more sense to roll this under the Infinity Blade umbrella,” he concluded.